Listening to Nina Simone sing ‘Strange Fruit’

…and reflecting on the scale of the violence perpetrated by white people against people of colour, from the tip of Africa to America, from the Middle East all the way across the Pacific to our tiny island homes. For me, Nina Simone’s rendition carries the raw emotional force of the song’s message like no other. Every time I listen to it, I am on the verge of tears.

Content warning: This post contains the depiction and discussion of racism and extreme racial violence

Southern trees
Bearing strange fruit
Blood on the leaves
And blood at the roots
Black bodies
Swinging in the Southern breeze

Strange fruit hangin'
From the poplar trees
Pastoral scene
Of the gallant south

Them big, bulging eyes
And the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia
Clean and fresh
Then, the sudden smell
Of burnin' flesh

Here is a fruit
For the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather
For the wind to suck
For the sun to rot
For the leaves to drop
Here is a
Strange and bitter crop

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I didn’t know until recently that ‘Strange Fruit’ was written in the 1930s by a white Jewish man from the Bronx, NYC, named Abel Meeropol. Meeropol was a teacher, a poet, and composer, and was deeply troubled by the horrific racism that existed in the United States towards African Americans. When he saw a particular photograph of a lynching scene taken by Laurence Beitler (below), he was compelled to write ‘Strange Fruit’. The photo is of the lifeless bodies of two black men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, hanging from a tree by their necks; the tree is encircled by a huge mob of white people, some smiling as if at a celebration and aware that they are being photographed, they appear proud to be recorded on film, at that moment, in that disgusting scene, for the world to see. One man points to the bodies and stares into the camera, conscious of the moment being recorded and maybe hoping to ensure the photograph is understood as a warning to other people of colour.

Photograph by Lawrence Beitler - The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, Marion, Indiana. August 7, 1930.

As my research continued, I stumbled across a beautiful story about Abel Meeropol told by his adopted son. His son recounts that when he was a child, they had a Japanese Maple tree in their backyard, which had offshoots each year. Abel wouldn’t let anyone “kill the seedlings!”. Year after year, Abel would rescue all of the seedlings, and there were many, and he would plant them one by one into separate tin cans. Each fragile seedling might have been a metaphor for the black lives that were being taken.

These horrors extend across oceans and time, and the violence takes many forms. In Tahiti, the violence took another form, the mutineers of the Bounty kidnapped Tahitian women, colonisers and missionaries attempted to commit cultural genocide, syphilitic artists and sailors stole the futures of our daughters, the French incinerated our islands and waters at a scale unprecedented. For all the differences, one thing remains constant, the violent domination of people of colour by a vast range of white nations.